Genjuan International Haibun Contest 2017 Results

Grand Prix:
Season of Snow and Milk – Doris Lynch (USA)

An (Cottage) Prizes:
Trespass – David McCullough (Japan)
Feathers – John Parsons (UK)
Soldier’s Woundwort – Dimitar Anakiev (Slovenia)
What’s in a Name – Jim Norton (Ireland)
 
Honourable Mentions:
Getaways – Dru Philippou (USA)
Fathomless Ocean – Gabriel Rosenstock (Ireland)
M PATHY – Dorothy Mahoney (Canada)
The Baker’s Insomnia – Phillippa Yaa de Villiers (South Africa)
Nesting Bowls – Beth Skala (Canada)

Judges:
Nenten Tsubo’uchi, Stephen Henry Gill (Tito), Hisashi Miyazaki, Ellis Avery

What a wonderful genre is haibun, haiku-style prose! The four judges wish to thank all those who took the trouble to send something in to the Contest Office. We apologize for the slight delay in releasing the results this year and also offer our hearty congratulations to the authors of the above decorated works. This year we had 89 entries from 15 different countries on every imaginable topic! It was quite a difficult task for the judges to bring the field down to a short-list of 15 works. However, this year it proved fairly easy to decide on the prize-winners, in spite of the fact that one judge was not in Japan, but out in Australia! The Hailstone Haiku Circle here in Kansai can feel proud, as at last one of its members has won a prize (although Honourable Mentions had previously been attained) – David McCullough, for his very fine Trespass. The judges chose a work of supreme lightness by Doris Lynch as the Grand Prix winner. Now that we know the names of the writers, we can see that her piece has glided past the challenge from four considerable men! The top five Genjuan works HAVE NOW BEEN POSTED as a special page on the Icebox for all to enjoy. I wonder if you will agree with the judges that they are all excellent works? We are also planning to publish another Genjuan haibun anthology soon.

Guidelines and deadline for the 2018 Genjuan Contest will be posted here in due course.

Haiga Walk & NEW Hibikiai & Senri Times

Click on the page link marked ‘Haiga Walk – March 2017‘ at top right to enjoy Gerald’s illustrated report on the wonderful haiku sketching and painting outing to Umenomiya Taisha’s plum garden on March 14th, which he kindly organized.

Please also note the NEW time scheduling of our two English Haiku classes (for the next three months only):
KYOTO Hibikiai Forum 5/11, 6/8 and 7/13 18:30-20:00 (30 mins later than normal)
OSAKA Senri Bunka Centre 4/27, 5/25, 6/22 19:30-21:00 (90 mins later than normal; we will return to 18:00-19:30 from July)

Yoshihiko Suzuki

Today, I heard the sad news that one of Hailstone’s founding members, Yoshihiko Suzuki, had passed away of cancer last month in Nishinomiya, aged 90. He graduated in 1951 from Tokyo Univ. as a mechanical engineer, later working for Sakae Kogyo KK. Because of his excellent English, he was often posted abroad. The trilingual haiku here is reproduced from his book, Signpost (pub. 1999). In it, we find Yoshihiko out in Thailand, from where he sent us many wonderful poems. The haiga of a Thai elephant is by his daughter, Ritsuko, whom, together with his wife Michiko, he leaves behind. There are grandsons, too (viz. another fine haiku, for which there is an extant kuhi (poem stone) in Hikami-cho in eastern Hyogo (btm. lt.). Our thoughts are with them all. [Click on any pic to see more detail.]Why? Why not? / Little grandson asking endlessly – / Spring evening

Summer shower – / Encountering a beauty, / Saying, “After you!”

Waiting in a long line / To cradle for a minute / The tiny koala …………. (Sydney, pub. The Meridian, 1998)

Floodwaters besieging / An old temple – / It grows dark …………. (Thailand, pub. Enhaiklopedia, 2005)

RIP

English Journal interview

In the current (August 2016) issue of Japan’s oldest English language educational journal, the “English Journal”, you may be surprised to find, alongside Barrack Obama’s Hiroshima speech and interviews with Lady Gaga and Paul Krugman, one with SHG (Tito) entitled “俳句に魅せられたイギリス人” (A Briton Spellbound by Haiku). In it, he talks about Buson, Basho, Hailstone Haiku Circle and the British Haiku Society. The magazine contains an audio CD so that you can listen to the original English words as you read them. A Japanese translation of the interview is also printed. Nobuyuki Yuasa wrote the introduction to the Tito interview. ￥1,512 from your nearest bookshop!

…… A Koya bee ……………………… 高野山
…… on a Koya thistle …………….. 蜂いる路の
…… on a Koya road ……………….. 薊かな

(haiku from the article by Tito; Jap. trans. by Hisashi Miyazaki)

Genjuan Haibun Contest 2016 Results

Grand Prix:
A Small Act – Diana Webb (UK)

An (Cottage) Prizes:
What’s in a Name? – Ignatius Fay (Canada)
The Great South Gate – Matthew Caretti (USA)
Arm in Arm with Iza – Maria Tirenescu (Romania)

Honourable Mentions:
Love Story  – Anita Curran Guenin (USA)
Majesty – Geethanjali Rajan (India)
A Spectacle – Branko Manojlovic (Japan)
One Grain of Sand – Mel Goldberg (Mexico)
Geronimo – Terri L. French (USA)

Judges:
Nenten Tsubouchi, Stephen Henry Gill (Tito), Hisashi Miyazaki

.  This year we had 127 entries from 16 different countries, our best ever response. The judges wish to thank all those who took the trouble to send something in to the Contest Office and they offer their hearty congratulations to the authors of the above decorated works.
. From a short-list of 14 works, it proved extremely difficult this year to decide on the winners. In the end, Diana Webb’s A Small Act appeared to be closest to exemplary. It is a very fine, open-ended work with good haikai taste.
.  We were bold with our AP selection, for one contained such beautiful haiku imagery, we overlooked the English errors, telling ourselves that they lent charm (a sort of ‘special encouragement prize’, if you like); and another had the ‘haiku’ dovetailed into the prose as isolated phrases, resulting in a captivating rhythmical momentum, although in isolation perhaps many of them would not be construed as bona fide haiku! We felt that we should choose pieces that had some charm and flair. All of the HMs were considered for prizes, but fell because of some unfortunate transgression in the eyes of at least two judges. It was a long session this year!
.  Now that we have been told the identities and countries of residence of the awardees, it is clear that the results well represent the geographical spread of entries, and we are pleasantly surprised by this. The last five short-listed (but un-awarded) works also included, it turns out, entries from Singapore, Australia and New Zealand, though none from South Africa: the Southern Hemisphere did not fare so well this year.
.  A Japanese language haibun contest is to be held this autumn by Nenten’s ‘Sendan’ group and the three judges have been invited to turn their minds to those pieces, too! The winning piece in that contest last year was translated and posted to this site in November https://hailhaiku.wordpress.com/2015/11/25/when-tuna-die/.  It is interesting to see how it compares to the entries in our own international competition. Certainly it has humour. We hope to translate and publish here this year’s Sendan winning piece, too. The top four Genjuan 2016 works will be posted later this month as a special page on the Icebox for all to enjoy.
.  Guidelines and deadline for the 2017 Genjuan Contest have now been posted on a separate page (find the page link at top right). Next year we will welcome one further judge, American haiku poet, novelist, contributor to Icebox and member of the Hailstone Haiku Circle, Ellis Avery, now based in New York. She teaches fiction writing at Columbia University, and her writer’s acumen and consciousness of haiku as a vehicle for story-telling will no doubt help us to sort the sheep from the goats next year as well as augmenting the comments we will be offering each of the awardees.

Journeys 2015

We seldom advertise others’ books on this site, but, given that two Hailstones (NY and SHG) and one recent visitor and Genjuan Haibun Grand Prix-winner (MC) are featured, we thought we would make an exception for ‘Journeys 2015’, which contains no less than 145 haibun, some published for the first time. If we look down the list of contributors’ names, we must conclude that this is sure to be an excellent collection of contemporary world haibun and fortifies the mission to make haibun a genre of world literature, one of the twin objectives of the Genjuan Haibun Contest (the other being to re-introduce the genre to its mother nation, Japan).

Tirelessly edited by Angelee Deodhar in Chandigarh, India. Hopefully, the collection will gain a large Indian readership, not to mention many others around the world. For a list of contributors please go here: http://contemporaryhaibunonline.com/pages113/A_News_Journeys2015.html and for ordering details, here: http://www.amazon.com/Journeys-2015-Anthology-International-Haibun/dp/1515359875

212 new Buson haiku discovered!

Tenri Library (near Nara) announced on 14 Oct. that they had discovered two new books of original haiku by Yosa Buson: one volume of Spring & Summer poems, the other of Autumn & Winter ones. Altogether, they contain just over 1,900 haiku, of which 212 are previously unknown! The name of the missing collection is Yahantei Buson Kushu. ‘Yahantei’ (Midnight Teahouse) was an alias inherited from his teacher, Hajin, which, later in his life, he used alongside his better-known one of ‘Buson’ (Turnip Village). Above is the first page of the Spring volume, bearing critical marks said to have been made by the poet himself. The book was once owned by his Kyoto disciple, Hyakuchi. They will go on show at the Library, along with many other Buson-related works, until Nov. 8. Hailstone is planning a trip there on Oct. 25 (Sun.). Free entry. Contact SHG (Tito) for details, or leave a message in the reply/comments box below.

To put the find into some sort of context, Stephen was interviewed over the phone by BBC Radio 4 on 16th and you can hear the resultant 3-4 min. passage in the arts programme, ‘Front Line’, (available on the i-player: wait until it has loaded, then fast forward to 17:48′) http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06gxysv.

One of the new haiku is:

傘も化て目のある月夜哉
karakasa mo bakete me no aru tsukiyo kana

The torn paper umbrella
has just become a ghoul …
with moonlit eyes!

(trans. SHG)